planet_scott:
I've been at it 30 minutes and can't get anything registered. The servers can't handle the traffic. I can't spen all afternoon hitting refresh. I do have a job.......

planet_scott:
I've been at it an hour and all I get is:Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Really? Can you not plan better than this?

jeffjm:
This seems like a perfect use case for something like Amazon Web Services, where you can rent additional capacity for known high-volume periods. The vast majority of the year, the registration site does nothing. Then when registration opens, it gets slammed. Some sort of cloud-based service would be the most cost-effective way to prepare for demand peaks like today.

nathanw:
There are some technical issues that it would be good to work out (and perhaps those of us who work in the field might be able to contribute to doing so), but the fact that it fills up so quickly, even in spite of the technical hurdles, tells us that there's a bigger problem of capacity. I know this is a regular subject of discussion, but absent the ability to make the competition itself much larger, it might make sense to have some way to allocate entries besides having the ability to sit in front of a computer and hit "refresh" all afternoon. For example, some kind of lottery - give people a week or two to enter and register, and then randomly choose as many entries as possible from among them.

(I'll also be curious to see the distribution of entries-per-person this year. I don't know how much it would help to dial it back from 15 to, say, 5 or 3, but that should be on the table, even if it makes things like the Ninkasi award less sensible).

rbeau:
apologies for being moronic, but I can't find a link to register. :-[